The distinctive, iconic voice of Vincent Price can be heard once again on a new 12″ EP featuring a never-before-released recitation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Conqueror Worm fused with a pulsating electronica score from London-based electronica outfit The Core.

Pressed on coloured vinyl with artwork designed by celebrated illustrator Graham Humphreys, this Limited Edition EP (300 units) is now available to order directly from our VP shop on this site for only £14.99 (excluding postage). One copy per customer.

Vincent Price and Patricia Routledge in rehearsal for 1968’s Darling of the Day

The Theatre Guild and Joel Schenker
Present
Vincent Price and Patricia Routledge
In a new musical

DARLING OF THE DAYBased on Arnold Bennett’s Buried Alive and his play The Great Adventure.
Also starring Brenda Forbes, Peter Woodthorpe and Teddy Green.
Composed by Jule Styne
Lyrics by EY Harburg

‘…thoroughly delightful. It has charm, tunefulness, humour, imagination, a good book, impeccable taste and a handsome production. Mr Price is convincing and charming as the artist in hiding… a superior musical comedy!’ (Richard Watts, The New York Post)

Darling of the Day is set in the England of 1905 – Edwardian and elegant – and it’s the story of a great and painfuly shy painter named Priam Farll (Vincent Price) who is summoned back to England after 20 years as a virtual recluse in the South Seas, to be knighted by his King.

After the death of his butler, Henry Leek, Farll assumes his identity, falls for a young widow called Alice Challice (Patricia Routledge) and they marry and settled in (what was then) lower middle-class Putney.

Life becomes complicated for Priam and Alice when his identity is unveiled and he ends up in court. However, when Farll warns that if there’s a ‘Butler in the Abbey’ the social structure of Britain will be shaken, the judge hastily rules that Leek must remain Leek…

Following Darling of the Day‘s pre-Broadway run, the York Theatre Company show had three previews before its premiere performance at the George Abbott Theatre (152 W. 54th St., New York, NY) on 27 January 1968. Following mixed reviews, the show folded after 31 performances, but it did earn Routledge the 1968 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical.

On 21 May 2016, a live musical performance showcasing the velvet voice of Vincent Price was held at the historic King & Queen pub in Fitzrovia.

This collaboration between London-based band The Core and Peter Fuller, curator of the Vincent Price Legacy UK community project, took inspiration from the Master of Menace’s performances in his best-known 1960s Gothic chillers and Poe’s classic poem, The Conqueror Worm, to conceive of two ‘Poe-gressive’ compositions utilising sythns and Theremin.

Ahead of the group’s studio recording of these two compositions later in the summer, here are the live recordings of the ‘jam’ sessions.

Do feel free to share and if you’d like to hear us perform live again, then do let us know.